Clients should not be concerned about “missing the best days in the market.” It’s not about missing the best days; it’s about sticking with a risk-managed, disciplined investment plan for the long run.

Every time the market gets bumpy, Wall Street pulls out the same old chart—the one warning investors that if they “miss the best days of the market,” their long-term returns will collapse.

I’ve seen this for more than 20 years now, and somehow the concept refuses to die.

The problem isn’t the chart itself. It’s what the chart doesn’t show.

When you zoom out, add context, and look at the market through a statistical lens, a very different picture starts to emerge.

And after another decade of fresh data (and an enormous amount of work from Vince Randazzo and others, who graciously gave me permission to reuse portions of their research), the truth behind “the best days” myth is even clearer than when I first wrote about it in 2015. (That article revisited the original white paper written by Paul Gire in 2005.)

Once you see the full picture, the old narrative falls apart fast.

The myth: Investors must stay fully invested or they will miss the best days

Here’s the sales pitch most people have seen: “If you miss just the 10 best days in the market over the last 20–30 years, your long-term return drops dramatically. So you should always stay invested.”

This message is usually surrounded by mountain charts, pie charts, and a gentle nudge to keep your clients’ money exactly where it is, often in whatever mutual fund, annuity, or managed account generated the chart in the first place.

What isn’t mentioned is where these “best days” come from … or what else is happening around them.

The reality: The best days happen during the worst market environments

When Randazzo re-ran the numbers through 2024, the results weren’t just interesting—they were damning for the old narrative.

Table 1 lays out what the data shows for the S&P 500 over the past 30 years.

Sources: Bloomberg and Norgate data, 1994–2024. Nearly all extreme daily returns occurred in downtrend conditions (price below 200-day SMA).

Summary: The biggest up days and the biggest down days almost all occur during the same chaotic, high-volatility periods—not during calm, healthy uptrends.

Sources: Bloomberg and Norgate data

Summary: The chart looks like someone splattered red and green paint all over the ugliest parts of the bear markets—times of high drama, high tension, and virtually zero stability.

So, here’s the point that Wall Street sales literature quietly skips: You only experience the “best days” if you’re willing to sit through the worst days wrapped around them.

And those worst days matter a lot more than most people realize.

Volatility isn’t just uncomfortable—it’s mathematically devastating

Let’s slow down and talk about the math for a second:

• If a portfolio drops 10%, you need an 11.1% gain to get back to even.
• If it drops 20%, you need 25%.
• A 50% drop? Now you need 100% to break even.

And heaven forbid clients should have to take withdrawals from their portfolios to supplement their retirement income.

This isn’t pessimism, it’s arithmetic.

And the more volatility rises, the more those asymmetries start to eat away at the long-term compounding value of a client’s retirement portfolio.

Randazzo visualized this beautifully in a Monte Carlo simulation.

Simulation of 30-year portfolio values with 9% average return and varying volatility (10%–25%). X-axis: years; Y-axis: portfolio value ($). Parameters: 1,000 trials, lognormal returns, $100 initial investment.

Sources: Bloomberg and Norgate data

Summary:

• At low volatility, the outcomes cluster tightly around the median.
• At high volatility, outcomes explode—some great, many disastrous.
• Even with the same average return, volatility alone determines a portfolio’s fate.

This is why retirees feel blindsided by sequence-of-return risk. It’s not the averages that inflict the pain; it’s the sequence of returns.

The most important chart Wall Street never shows

People love talking about missing the 10 best days, but you never see a chart about missing the worst days.

Thankfully, we’ve recreated one of the cleanest versions the public has ever seen.

Sources: Bloomberg and Norgate data, 1988–2023

Summary: Missing the 10 worst months (which resulted in a gain of $6,378) is more than three times as powerful as staying in the market via buy and hold (which resulted in a gain of $1,930) and capturing the best periods.

This is the death blow to the old, stale, sales-ridden talking point.

Because if you’re already showing people how much they “lose” by missing the best days, you owe them the honesty of showing what happens when they miss the worst days too.

Why does Wall Street keep pushing the best-day narrative?

As my dad used to say when I was a kid: “Follow the money.”

Buy and hold is easy. It’s scalable. It’s profitable.

And it’s very comfortable (not to mention “convenient”) for:

• Mutual fund companies
• Insurance carriers
• Asset-gatherers
• The financial advisors and brokers that big Wall Street firms train

But here’s the quiet truth: No investment product manufacturer benefits when you sell or reduce your exposure to their investments during high-risk periods.

That doesn’t necessarily make them villains. It just means that financial advisors need to look out for their clients’ best interests—because the industry’s incentives won’t.

A more complete understanding of market history

When you step back and look at the full 30-year dataset, here’s what jumps off the page:

1. Market returns are path-dependent. The order of returns matters enormously, and averages hide this.
2. Extreme volatility clusters during major downtrends. The “best days” and “worst days” are fraternal twins.
3. Drawdowns dictate long-term financial outcomes. Not annual returns. Not averages. Drawdowns.
4. Investors don’t need to perfectly time anything. They don’t need to chase the best days. They just need to avoid the worst market regimes and times of extremely high market volatility, especially during downtrends.

What should advisors and their investor clients take away from this?

• No, this isn’t a call to day-trade.
• No, you don’t need to predict market peaks or bottoms.
• No, you don’t need AI, a palm reader, or any sort of clairvoyance.

You simply need to manage risk with the same seriousness that you manage returns.

Because the old narrative (the “don’t miss the best days in the market” warning) is only half the story—and half-stories create bad decisions.

The full story says something very different:

• The best days almost always occur in terrible markets.
• Missing the worst days (not capturing the best) is what transforms outcomes.
• Volatility isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s corrosive.
• It’s impossible to miss either the best or the worst days in the market.
• It is possible to miss both the best and worst days in the market by avoiding these prolonged, extremely volatile times when the market is in a downtrend.
• Risk management isn’t market timing. It’s stewardship of your clients’ hard-earned life savings.

At the end of the day, investors deserve more than a sales slogan. They deserve the truth—the whole truth—and a framework that respects both sides of the volatility coin.

If there’s one thing the last 30 years of data screams loudest, it’s this: An investor’s long-term success, especially near or in retirement, depends more on avoiding deep drawdowns than on obsessing over capturing the best days in the market.

And that’s a message worth repeating—even a decade later.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and the sources cited and do not necessarily represent the views of Proactive Advisor Magazine. This material is presented for educational purposes only.